Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature Volume 5 Article 9 Number 2 Winter 2006 Winter 2006 Review of Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The onceptC of Early German Romanticism. Marianne Tettlebaum Haverford College Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Recommended Citation Tettlebaum, Marianne (2006). Review of "Review of Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The oncC ept of Early German Romanticism.," Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature: Vol. 5 : No. 2 Available at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/vol5/iss2/9 This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/vol5/iss2/9 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Tettlebaum: Tettlebaum on Beiser Frederick C. Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2003. 243 pp. (+ xiii) ISBN 06740011805. Reviewed by Marianne Tettlebaum Haverford College Die ganze Geschichte der modernen Poesie ist ein fortlaufender Kommentar zu dem kurzen Text der Philosophie: Alle Kunst soll Wissenschaft, und alle Wissenschaft soll Kunst werden; Poesie und Philosophie sollen vereinigt sein. (Friedrich Schlegel, KritischeFragmente, 1797) [The entire history of modern poetry is a running commentary on the short text of philosophy: all art should become science and all science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be made unified.] What would it mean to take seriously the task Friedrich Schlegel's fragment sets for the future of art and science? What would a unified poetry- philosophy be? What kind of practice would it entail? What kind of texts would it produce? That we ought indeed to take this demand seriously is the argument of Frederick Beiser's The Romantic Imperative, a collection of ten essays about the late eighteenth-century intellectual movement known in German as Frühromantik and commonly associated with the early writings of Novalis, Friedrich Schelling, August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher, among others. Beiser argues that the ideas of these thinkers amount to nothing less than a political, ethical, and philosophical program for changing the world. Because Schlegel's call for an art that would become science and a science that would become art -- what in another fragment he calls the "romantic imperative" -- encapsulates, for Beiser, the romantics' program for change, it is worth dwelling a little longer on the above fragment before returning to his book. If the first part of the fragment is any indication, in a unified poetry- philosophy, poetry would no longer serve merely as "commentary" on philosophy; rather, poetry would presumably be part of the "text" of philosophy, and philosophy would be part of the "commentary" of poetry. If poetry, in other words, is that which comments on philosophy, and philosophy is the text upon which poetry reflects, then a unification of poetry and philosophy would also mean a unification of commentary and text as integral parts of each other. In fact, it would render the distinction between a BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, Volume 5 , Number 2 (Winter 2006) 0 1 Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, Vol. 5, No. 2 [2018], Art. 9 text and its interpretation or commentary antiquated, a relic of a divided intellectual age before art became science and science art. It is not modern poetry itself that comments on philosophy in Schlegel's fragment, but modern poetry's history. This poetic history, however, is not solely of the past, for it also constitutes the present as a "running commentary." Philosophy, in turn, is represented by a short text. This text of philosophy, however, is not about the present; rather, it makes a demand for the future. It is, we might say, an imperative. What must actually be unified here, then, is a philosophical imperative with its poetic-historical commentary. The paradox involved in such an endeavor ought to be apparent. What Schlegel's fragment demands is nothing less than the unification of the history of poetry with the future of philosophy. It calls for a poetry-philosophy in which the imperative for the future is inseparable from the poetic-historical commentary upon it. It calls, in other words, for a philosophy that must ultimately be realized in the history of poetry and a poetic history that aspires to the demand of philosophy. To write poetic- historical commentary, then, would be to issue an imperative for the future, and to issue an imperative for the future would be to write poetic-historical commentary. Before we settle on just any form of writing for this circular task, we would do well to consider the form in which Schlegel issues his challenge: the fragment. The audacity of Schlegel's demand -- its prophetic claim about the entire history of modern poetry, the content of philosophy, and the future of art and science -- is, after all, counteracted by the modesty of the concise, unassuming form in which it is written. This fragment is simply one among many others; its extravagant claims are not matched by any privileged position or emphasis. Its effectiveness, we might say, derives precisely from its modesty. Indeed, we might even go so far as to suggest that its demand is modesty itself. We should understand the unification of poetry and philosophy, in other words, as a modest goal, something we achieve not on a grand scale but in the minutest level of detail. The precondition for the true unification of two intellectual endeavors, the fragment implies, is modesty -- the ability to think the grandeur of the whole microcosmically. In this respect, The Romantic Imperative is at once too modest and not modest enough. The book is Beiser's attempt to rectify what he perceives as the failure of recent scholarship to address the philosophy of early German Romanticism: "its epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and politics" (ix). Recent scholars, Beiser argues, have not heeded Schlegel's call for the unification of poetry and philosophy; they have focused on literature at the expense of philosophy and so have created the impression that philosophy was unimportant, even contradictory to the aims of the Frühromantik. BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, Volume 5 , Number 2 (Winter 2006) https://repository.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/vol5/iss2/9 2 Tettlebaum: Tettlebaum on Beiser Beiser's essays, originally written at various points over the last decade, are thus intended to expose the reader to the neglected philosophical aspects of early German romanticism. Although the essays do not present a continuous argument, they do proceed with increasing complexity and detail from an overview of the general background and aims of the Frühromantik (Chapters One-Six) to a more specific consideration of its attempts to resolve the philosophical problems it inherited from Leibniz, Spinoza, Fichte, and Kant (Chapters Eight-Ten). In the middle stands the only chapter (Chapter Seven) that focuses specifically on a particular representative of the Frühromantik, in this case, Friedrich Schlegel. Beiser labels the essays "introductory, an attempt to guide the anglophone reader through unfamiliar territory" (ix). But here he is overly modest; for his book is aimed as much at the expert as it is at the amateur. He wants not only to introduce the philosophy of early German romanticism to an unfamiliar audience but also to rethink its legacy in current scholarship, which, for him, means counteracting, if not invalidating, the understanding of German romanticism we have inherited from Paul de Man, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Manfred Frank, and Isaiah Berlin, among others. That Beiser lumps these scholars together under the rubric of "postmodern," a term he leaves undefined but that seems to stand for anything having to do with literary theory, is puzzling, to say the least. In attempting to recuperate a role for philosophy in what he characterizes as a predominantly literary understanding of Frühromantik, Beiser reinscribes the very division between philosophy and literature that the romantics, in his view, were trying to overcome. His attempt to reconstruct the philosophy of early German romanticism, in other words, is premised upon the bracketing of literary concerns from philosophical ones. When he characterizes the "literary approach" of de Man or Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy as "one-sided," he forecloses the possibility, envisioned by Schlegel above, that what is literary (or poetic) must also be philosophical. If Beiser's characterization of his essays as introductory is too modest, then his claim to "reconstruct the individuality of Frühromantik" via a broad philosophical-historical overview is not modest enough. I do not mean here that it suffers from a lack of humility. Rather, I mean that its overarching argument does not pay enough attention to the minute, even modest details of the texts from which it draws its support. For the sake of a coherent philosophical argument it sacrifices attention to the individual texts of individual German romantic authors. An attention to the general over the specific is, one might argue, necessary for an introductory account that attempts to convey unfamiliar ideas to its readers. But in the case of the Frühromantik such a necessity is more problematic. What seems to me crucial about the Frühromantik -- what I have attempted to convey in my opening analysis of Schlegel's fragment -- is that its struggle to convey ideas is bound up with its struggle to find the appropriate form in which to convey BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE, Volume 5 , Number 2 (Winter 2006) 0 3 Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, Vol. 5, No. 2 [2018], Art. 9 them. Those who turn to Beiser's account for an introduction to early German romanticism will be exposed neither to its struggles with language and form nor to the wonderful playfulness that such struggles bring to its approach to philosophy.